


This Monstrous Feeling

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Dark, Dubious Consent, Endgame Related, F/M, collection, links to other stories, read them first
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-05 02:42:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10295696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "And when she turns back there are tears in her eyes, not the kind she can hide though he imagines she wants to. The kind of tears forged from something so pitiful it makes him feel void of anything other than acute agony, which needles the very sinews of his muscles, coating each nerve in a thick sadness. These tears, he thinks, are a by-product of the journey she didn’t have to make."Huge thanks to Mia Cooper for digging me out of a hole with this one. Something went wrong when I published originally, and bits of text were missing - sorry.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks:Thank you, thank you to Mia Cooper - she actually wrote a part of this, when I was completely jammed, and she did it beautifully. The she beta'd it, and she did that beautifully too. 
> 
> Disclaimer: These characters don’t belong to me, and nor does any reference or allusion to plots or idea that are  
> recognisably Paramount’s or CBS’. I make no gain – monetary or otherwise - from writing these stories.
> 
> Author's note: This may not be to everyone's taste, but I nonetheless hope it is enjoyed by some. It is, as always, dark. This is linked to Mia Cooper's 'The Second Circle' and Caladenia's 'He'd Pity You' which can be found in the collection 'Counterpoint Vignettes'. Enjoy them. Trust me.

 

 

* * *

_“This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.”_

_Ayn Rand_

* * *

 

 

 

When she came aboard, he thinks casually, trying not to glance at her across the Messhall, he’d genuinely been accepting of the imposed distance. There has been something comforting about the inclination both of them appeared to have to exclude him from their plans. 

Comforting, and painful.

It seems, these days, to be a natural response to him anyway, from his Captain. It has come, however slowly, to be the way under which his partnership with her operates. It hurt at first, robbing him of sleep and of his dignity and worth, but now it feels like a distant pain, an indistinct wound which has scabbed and healed over. Unless, and these occasions are hardly rare, that wound is re-opened.

There is no value left in him and his person for Kathryn Janeway, he’s come to realise. He’s been spent, and shut out in the frigid cold of her impressive indifference.

Temporal anomalies, and this kind of bizarre circumstance, always feel far beyond his better graces anyway, and he doesn’t try to pretend it is his area of expertise. And, if he is being brutal with himself, he is relieved not to be privy to the machinations of two of them; he has barely survived one of them these last seven years, never mind _her_ in duplicate.

Still, it doesn’t stem the feeling of exclusion, or of jealousy, that grows vines and tendrils through his blood.

They are ensconced in a corner, coffee cups cradled lazily across, lean crossed thighs, and if it wasn’t for the age difference – clear and sharp and cool - it would be disconcerting. It must be, he thinks, like being within and outwith yourself; observing and being observed by you, infinitely wiser and – he despises the thought – infinitely more bitter.

He’s seen it already, in the set of the Admiral’s graceless, arrogant smile and small, powerful body. She has grown into a predator, sleek and cunning and armed with the kind of plan he imagines her younger self will find impressively intelligent and measure as _just_ dangerous enough to take a chance.

“You are distracted,” Seven observes, setting down her cup of water and quirking a brow.

“I am distracted,” he shrugs, peeling the skin from the orange he’s been rolling between his fingers. “Just tired. I didn’t sleep very much at all.”

Seven nods, then lingers around the desire to say something before she clearly decides not to. He isn’t sure that her dampened frankness is a good sign, but it is certainly easier to deal with.

“Seven, have you spoken much to Admiral Janeway?”

If the question comes as a surprise to her, she never lets it show. Seven is, he has learned recently and quite to his chagrin, very good at suppressing emotion.

It makes for frigid pillow talk.

Not for the first time, that wheedling, vicious little voice in his head asks him what the hell he is doing.

Because he knows the answer, he silences it again.

But when he does that, it just roars louder.

“No,” Seven answers. “I have not. She keeps mostly to the Captain. I believe she is finding it difficult to convince Captain Janeway to follow her plan.”

He nods, drops the uneaten segments on his plate, suddenly feeling a tightness in his stomach he can’t quite explain.

Seven is about to say something when her comm badge mercifully chirps and, while he isn’t sure her next statement is likely to be an invasive one, he doesn’t want to talk through his conflicting emotions with her.

For a great many reasons, the least of which is the fact she can’t possibly understand them.

“Speak,” she demands as she taps it.

And her bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired too.

 _“Seven, Icheb and I need your help with the bio-molecular model_ ,” Naomi’s plaintive, sweet little voice requests.

Seven nods, “I shall be there soon.”

Not for the first time does it occur to him that her time is spent, if not with Kathryn mothering her, then with Icheb and Seven building puzzles and exploring phenomena.

His thought process needs no further exploration before he begins to cringe.

“Go now,” he says softly.

“I-“

“I know they’ll need your help,” he mutters. “Go.”

She looks thoughtful for a moment, before standing and lifting her tray. He resists watching her go, though the temptation is still there – dangling in front of him, hanging amongst the best of sins. Instead he lowers his eyes and, when he knows Seven has gone, he lifts his head to watch the two women in the corner again.

When he does, he meets Kathryn’s eyes; remote, slightly pained, but with a lingering warmth he feels is habitual more than intentional. She smiles just a little from behind the perfectly coiffed, white hair of her companion, and then returns her attention to her.

The other woman does not acknowledge that moment of distraction, if it is a moment at all.

Had this been a year ago, even six months ago, he would have joined them. He would have felt able to do that, before Kashyk, before Sullivan, before Teero, before Quarra.

He would have taken her – them – a carafe of coffee and some pastries and made both of them eat.

Then he might have had the courage to ask her what their future was.

That was, of course, assuming they had a future.

He thinks not.

He is about to leave when Kim and Paris sidle in, planting themselves in the vacant chairs at his table.

“Morning,” he says dryly, not waiting on a formal greeting anymore.

“Not the same is it?” Harry asks morosely, pouring himself a lukewarm coffee.

“Without Neelix?” Chakotay clarifies.

He nods and Paris rubs his own eyes as his answer disappears into a yawn.

“’Nother false alarm,” he explains as Chakotay grins at him. “If this baby doesn’t come soon, and give me a good reason for not sleeping, I might lose my temper.”

“How’s B’Elanna?” he asks, glad to be concentrating on a happier subject.

“Taking maternity leave as well as can be expected,” Tom answers darkly. “Maybe you could drop by, take the heat off me for a while. You always calm her down.”

“Or you could send the captain and…the admiral,” Harry flicks his head towards the women in the corner. “If one can calm her, I imagine two could sedate her.”

Tom shakes his head.

“No disrespect but it’s…”

“Disconcerting?” Chakotay asks, relieved someone else shares his discomfort.

“I was going to say creepy, but you describe it a little more eloquently,” Tom smiles, then yawns again and stands. “See you on the Bridge, Commander.”

“Mhhmm,” he agrees, pulling the PADD he’d brought with him in front of him. “See you in a while.”

When they are gone he returns his attention, with the best discretion he can muster, to the Captain and the Admiral. If he knew either of them and, once upon a time, he knew one of them so intimately he had thought he could decipher every fragment of her person, the discussion was becoming heated.

He doesn’t imagine either of them could win against themselves.

As the Messhall empties itself of the breakfast rush, he becomes slowly aware of the fact his observations will become evident. He’s not touched his breakfast, and his coffee has cooled, and he’s spent half an hour just watching.

No, it doesn’t bother him at all that they’ve decided he isn’t worthy of their plans.

 And then he smiles grimly, because it is destroying him. And he revels in the agony of it.

 

-0-0-0-0-0-

 

He remembers, once, stumbling upon a book he should not have read. There were few books in their settlement on Dorvan, and those that had somehow survived the years of pilgrimage were coveted as dangerous treasures by the adults. It was not, he realises now, that the children were denied education by way of reticence, but that it was a method of forestalling the inevitable.  The timeless, inevitable loss of innocence which was a rite of passage into the bleak coils, tight and tightening, of adulthood.

As an elder, and a self-elected sage of the tribe, his father was in possession of a few of them. He’d stumbled into, rather than sought, reading this one.

It had been about the persecution of his people.

The images, like old etchings in Colonial books about birds and plants, had carved themselves –gently, but indelibly – into his mind. He couldn’t close it over, and he’d felt shame and knowledge and anticipation of the next revelation with each passing moment, felt the rasping edges flitter between his fingers, the cracked and ancient leather warming and icing his palms all at once.

He remembers the feeling of his stomach emptying, surging towards the stone floor and lifting towards his gullet, simultaneously.

Now, now he stands here, it’s not entirely different, and though he recognises the self-indulgence in the notion, and he knows it’s not entirely the same.

 _Pale, straining neck tugged forcefully back, mouth making an_ obscene (he pushes _delicious_ away, though he wonders if lexical choice matters when committing a crime as grotesque as this) _‘o’._

It etches itself into his brain, carved with a blunt razor.

If anything in him was decent, he’d push his fingers against the flashing panel and tap the commands to permanently delete it.

From the console anyway, from the depths of _Voyager’s_ memory.

Nothing can delete, now, what he knows and has seen.

_His fingers, long, leather-clad, hard, are curling around her hair like a length of thick rope and twisting it, and even though it’s short he somehow manages it._

_She whimpers, face turning away from the camera.  Revealing the bloom of a purpling bruise, just where her pips should be._

He wonders if she knew, if – at any moment – the Devoran had told her.

Chakotay knows, reserving it somewhere so deep he can’t bring it into the light of day, that he fucked her in front of his troops. That they stood, leather clad and straining alien cocks, and watched it.

 And she _let_ them.

He isn’t supposed to know, because she looks at him as if he’s broken everything she destroyed first. As if she didn’t give everything, and more, to the nothingness she was left with.

She looks at him like she’s never fucked something other. As if, in doing what he does with Seven, he somehow delivered the first blow.

Something that isn’t them.

He feels the silence then, the only sounds the grunts and whimpers and her plaintive, too practised ‘fuck me’, serving as a bizarre soundtrack to this final request. _Voyager_ , hanging limp and suspended at the end of their epic, quiet and empty of the life she used to thrum with.

Her captain, he thinks, her ship. The one becomes the other.

  _He pushes her up against the coffee table, thrusting her thighs open, and she is facing away from the camera. He moves to take the gloves off. And she breathes, groans, ‘keep them on’. And the Inspector grins, and he asks ‘would he be man enough to fuck you like this?’_

The tell, of course, as Chakotay imagines the soft, black leather sliding into her – one, two, three – is the visceral little moan and her head falling back.

 She doesn’t answer though. The absence of words in favour of noise.

The absence of love in favour of immolation.

Her silence is a condemnation so extreme that he grips the edges of the console until his fingers feel close to breaking.

She’d stopped him this morning, pale hand curling around his upper arm. Stopping him, still, in his stride.  He’d almost ceased breathing; hoping, amongst all the thorns she’d promised as roses, that she’d suddenly change her mind. 

Moving on had always seemed so far away that, when the moment came, it struck him as impossible.

“Chakotay,” she’d smiled. “Chakotay, could you do me one last favour?”

“Of course,” he’d answered, hurt curdling the last vestiges of hope.

“The encrypted files need to be cleared from the computer, or downloaded to the back-up, and there are sensitive First Contact items in there, as well as some personal musings.  If we clear as much space as possible, it will make the central computer faster for the push. Only you and I have the clearance to delete, and I trust you to be judicious. I’m working through them, but Admiral Janeway wants to speak with me. Would you mind?”

He’d seen something flash in her eyes, something which resembled fear. But he knew she had secrets, and maybe she suspected he knew too. He pushed it away.

 She just didn’t realise the extent of what he knew of her.

It turned his stomach.

 

She’d simply smiled, and shrugged it away.

“I’ll do it as a matter of urgency, Captain,” he’d said, meaning it as the barb it was.

She didn’t even flinch.

_She’s flinching now, as the Inspector grasps one perfectly white breast and squeezes – hard enough for her to twitch away – and then takes it, pulling, tugging, between sharp and white and not exactly human teeth._

_He bites down. She moans._

So he’d found himself in front of his terminal, in his office on their ship, working through files and videos and audios from years before.  For his captain, for his admiral.

And there, under the innocuous and bizarre name of ‘Francesca’ had been this file, nestled between a report she’d written up on the Devoran detestation of telepaths and the bizarre occurrences and ship-wide failures a few weeks later.

So he’d stumbled into this too.

It occurs to him, only now, as he watches her sink to her knees and devour the pale, narrow-long jutting length of the alien who’d so aptly matched her in cleverness and, it seems, in proclivities, that this video could have been found by any curious snooper who knew how to access the loopholes in the clearance.

B’Elanna, Paris, Ayala.

Tuvok.

Seven.

Even Icheb when he’s feeling adventurous.

 

He wonders how many people have seen their captain bent, pale and narrow, across the length of a quarter couch and fingered mercilessly from behind by a man who wanted to destroy them. 

He wonders why he can’t switch this off. And why he’s so hard he’s sore with the intensity of it.

But those things don’t really need much exploration beyond the things he already knows about her, and about how he’s drawn to her.

It’s not simply jealousy, he realises, though a coward would attribute their feelings to the simplicity of envy and be done with it. Maybe even jerk off guiltily and consign it to the less chivalrous vestiges of his mind as he mops up his own mess with the uniform he’ll soon be able to shirk forever.

It’s more than that, so much more.

It’s betrayal of her, of him, of everything he’s waited for.

It’s a betrayal of the things he pretended not to know. Having it held up to him from an angle he cannot ignore – not just an over-strained rotator cuff or skin abrasion she winces over and he heals and she ignores – making it so much more difficult a moment to forget. He knew about the other holograms, about the dark, cretinous things she does when she thinks no one is watching. He knows. He’s always known.

But he did not know about this.

 _She’s on her hands and knees, oblivious, flushed face pushing and pulling away from the camera with each thrust_ _. The Inspector leans forward, huge body looming over her, and takes her pale, fine jaw in his long pale fingers and rotates her mouth towards his._

_“So beautiful.”_

_“No.”_

And when she turns back there are tears in her eyes, not the kind she can hide though he imagines she wants to. The kind of tears forged from something so pitiful it makes him feel void of anything other than acute agony, which needles the very sinews of his muscles, coating each nerve in a thick sadness. These tears, he thinks, are a by-product of the journey she didn’t have to make.

Suddenly his body is enlivened with the urgency of the violation, and he slams his fingers onto the console to delete it, before he has to witness any more.

Then he leans over, the screen whiting out to a hazy static, and feels himself breathe for the first time in minutes. He does not look up when the doors slide open, because there is only one person who can access his office like that. He cannot look into those eyes.

Those eyes, he thinks, as time grinds to a halt then propels him into the past, they used to dance. Now they are the colour of flint, of steel, of ice on a dark morning. They are still.

And yet he loves her. And he thinks, above all, he might pity her.

And he realises he hates what she’s become.

“Anything interesting?”

Her voice is light, lifting over the words with such blissful ignorance that he wants to weep. If she’s playing a part, he can’t understand why.

He can’t believe it has come to this.

“No,” he whispers. “Nothing I didn’t expect.”

She steps towards him, and then seems pulled back, as if by a current.  Her hands, which were reaching up to touch him, return to her sides.

There is something she wants to say, and he wants her to say it.

He pictures himself forcing the words from her, as Kashyk did. The plain misery of the fact she confessed her sins to that alien seems to be the final blow in a round of punches he isn’t meant to withstand.

And the last blow is one of pity, a euthanizing, sanitising blow.

“Shall we Captain?”

Everything is gone.

She just nods.

-0-0-0-0-0-

 

The insomnia will not abate, haunting him until he pulls on some sweats and wanders the quite greyness of _Voyager_ at sleep. 

He cannot push those images from his mind, the paleness of her skin, the sheen on it that he wants to taste.

And her implacable, too–aware, obliviousness as she spoke to him.

Seven had come to him earlier that night, pliant and ready and attempting to be soft and wearing a tawdry negligee she’d replicated from the dusty records of some long lost contrived idea of sexuality. Maybe on other women it would have been delightful – soft pale skin, small hips, and small breasts – but on Seven it seemed hard and cheap.

He’d tried really, tugging and pulling at an ardour he thought he should have.

He couldn’t manifest anything resembling desire.

He’d apologised profusely, and her blushing had been on his behalf rather than her own. She’d excused herself, and he hadn’t the heart or the balls to go after her.

Then he’d thought of Kathryn – fine, dark, distant, - borrowed Kashyk’s skin, slid into leather and viciousness - and grew hard and sore and worked himself in a fury, rage filling every inch of his body with desperation until he cried her name out into the vastness of his own misery, rolling over and sobbing into his pillow, thighs sticky and tense.

With that regular guilt comes insomnia, and so he wanders the ship to the fitness suite, where he spends a punishing hour on the running machine, pounding every muscle in his body into a physical pain equal to the pain in his mind. He slams his hand onto the stop button and slumps over the rail, sweat coursing down the valley of his back and dampening the cotton of his vest.

Then he stumbles from the machine and out into the quiet of the corridor and then into the Messhall, for a cool water. The punishing sense of guilt is still coursing through him, hardening his blood and his bones and the goodness in him.

He slumps towards the replicator and orders an iced water, closing his hands around the glass with a sigh and leaning his forehead against the cool console.

“You’re up late.”

It is the first time he’s heard her voice since she arrived, and with age it is even richer and darker and breathier that it is now.

Than it was in those files.

 Like coffee or arsenic. He swallows the sudden terror rearing in his breast.

His heart begins to jump in his chest and he thinks of fleeing her and the empty Messhall, but it is too late to pretend he hasn’t heard her. He may well be terrified, but he can’t be rude to her.

And just a fraction of him feels validated by her conversation, after she’s ignored him for the last few days.

He turns to her voice, squinting through the half-light to see her perched and curled into the viewer, her back against the frame and her hip and thigh pressed to the glass and the stars which blur past them.  She looks like an old picture perched there, a painting of a fairy-tale, from the early 20th century.

She looks sage, innocent, deadly, all in one.

 She doesn’t seem to be disconcerted by his presence, but he imagines she isn’t pleased with it either.  She looks like she wants to be alone and it is so typical of her to seek isolation in the now, he can’t imagine her any different in the future.

He wonders if she forgets all the things she’s done.

“I’ll go-”

“Stay,” she says quickly, softly, and he wonders if he detects something of desperation crackling through the confidence of her demand.

“It’s late.”

“I promised myself I wouldn’t seek you out,” she says, almost to herself.

If this was her confessional, he could not be her confessor.  If this was something he was supposed to be ignorant of too, he can’t pretend.

“Then I won’t bother you,” he says, unable to look at her.

“Oh Chakotay,” she whispers, though it carries to him as a plea across the space between them. “Please stay.”

He feels repulsed as she turns her glittering eyes towards him, voice soft and pleading. The images flood back into his mind, edges sharp as knives. He hears the plea in her breath. Hears it shatter through time and space to sound desperate in the now. 

“I have nothing to lose,” she says, shrugging, turning her face away. “That doesn’t mean I have anything to give you either.”

The words are tinged with pain, and with the knowledge of something he realises he doesn’t possess and can’t.

This is not his Kathryn and she had seen things beyond what even he could conceive.  She is damaged even beyond that woman who let Kashyk into her body.

The pain in her voice, and her sadness, compels him to remain too, no matter how agonising it will prove to be for him.  He know what happens when you intrude on Kathryn’s private world.

And it’s poisoned him.

“Adm-“ she looks up, eyes glistening with indignation at the formality of it all. He understands his misstep immediately. “Kathryn, how about a coffee?”

She holds up her mug and blue-grey steam curled towards the ceiling. He hasn’t noticed it before. He hasn’t noticed the humanity in her.

He moves towards her, clattering his own glass against it.

“Cheers,” he smiles, though he knows it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“What are we celebrating?”

He shrugs, “I don’t know. My intellectual emancipation from a dream I’ll never achieve.”

She tilts her head to the side, and he notices then that despite her advancing years she doesn’t seem old at all. Bathed in stars, soft light curling around her, she looks positively peaceful.

And beautiful.

In a classic, ageless way.

It must be a trick of the light.

He thought, once, he’d get to grow old with her.

The thought makes his ribs tighten like iron.

“You still have dreams?” She offers into the quiet.

“I used to.”

“I know I destroyed those,” she says, the softness of her words a juxtaposition to hardness of the admission.

He says nothing, because there is nothing he can say.

“And I never apologised,” she takes a sip of coffee, and he thinks that is all she will say when she continues. “And then it was too late. I try to trace it back…I try to find myself, find you. It never works.”

He turns to her, to look at her shadowed face.

“There’s no one point,” he lies gently, because he doesn’t know how else to answer.

What he wants to say is _I reached that point this morning, when I saw what you would do._

“Is it enough to say sorry now, to ask you to give her a chance?”

He does not answer.

“I-“

“Does the name Francesca mean anything to you?”

He watches her face; slow, dawning recognition. He expects her – because he still believes, somewhere in her, there is something which resembles humility – to grimace or turn away. Instead she smiles, but it is laced with a darkness he wants to run from.

“I found it, years ago…” she looks away. “I assume you’ve found it?”

“Uhuh.”

He doesn’t know how else to answer. She laughs bitterly, as if it is a shock to her. Maybe it is.

“No ‘how could you?’ ‘Why would you?’”

“I know why you did it. I know that’s what you like,” he says, embarrassment almost flaring to show on his cheeks.

He suppresses it.

“It’s what I like, yes,” she says simply, then her voice hitches as she continues, “But not for the reasons you think. You don’t know me, not really.”

“I don’t know you,” he agrees, anger spilling through the words. “I don’t know her.”

“When was the last time you asked her to tell you?”

He hears the anger in her voice for the first time.

“I-“

“Not for a long time. Not since Kashyk.”

He agrees. Sidles away from her. Does not speak.

“Do you know anything, really? Do you know what happened to her? To me?”

He feels blindsided by the accusation in her voice, by the blunt anger there.

“No,” he nearly moans, sudden agony rearing up in him. “No. Tell me.”

 “You’ve seen me before,” she tells him, as she clings to her coffee, a lifeline. “Or, not me. Others like me. On Bajor, in the internment camps. In the Maquis.”

He stares, waiting.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be a cliché if it weren’t so common,” her voice is softer now.  “Maybe that’s what I object to most. That I’m just another statistic, a collection of syndromes.”

And he doesn’t want it, but it comes anyway. Revelation. Realisation.

And as if turning a tap, the hatred drains from his very toes, flooding into the dense silence which surrounds them.

“Kathryn,” he squeezes his eyes shut, a vain attempt to stop this, to stop her from suffering a wrong that was done to her so long ago it’s become her. “Who was it?”

“Kashyk reminded me of them, in a way,” she evades. “It’s why I knew him, I suppose. Why I knew how to manage him. Knew how to get what I wanted.”

She places her coffee cup deliberately on the window ledge, uncurls to her feet.

“Cardassians,” she answers him finally. “I don’t even know how many there were. After the first two I stopped screaming. A few more, and I just kept my eyes closed. What difference did it make, anyway?”

He looks for it in her eyes – the pain, the damage – and finds nothing.

He doesn’t know how to feel about that.

“This is all classified, of course.” Her mouth twists. “Which is only part of the reason I kept it from you, all those years. I didn’t want it to define me.”

She laughs, so suddenly he jumps.

“Of course, it always has. I just don’t think I realised, until it was too late. By then, you’d given up on me.”

He finds himself unstuck, at last, from the quicksand her confession has sunk his feet into. “It doesn’t,” he tells her, and he can’t recall the last time he felt something so passionately. “It doesn’t have to anymore. Kathryn –”

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry.” It’s sharp, and it takes everything in him to quell his flinch.

He nods, because he understands. He understands that ‘sorry’ is not what this woman wants, and it is not what she needs.

He used to know what she needed.

“I need you tell me you’ll try.”

She whispers it, and at first he isn’t sure he hears her properly. He turns to look at her and, for the first time in years, there is hope on her face. It doesn’t matter that it’s older, or that it isn’t actually her, only that she has hope. That across the time and space and fate, she still has hope.

He never thought she did.

“Do you – does she – want me to?”

He asks, sliding his fingers towards hers. She flinches, and then she touches the tips of his fingers with the edges of her manicured nails.

“She does, I do. I did.” She looks at him. “I’ve lied to her, you see. I always lied to myself, so it seems. I told her I came back to save the crew, to give you all a chance at life. I didn’t. I did it to give _her_ a chance.”

She shrugs and looks at him.

“You know I’m selfish-“

“No,” he whispers, but its firm. “No, Kathryn, you’re anything but.”

“I am what I am,” she evades. “But she doesn’t have to become that. Give me what I thought you promised. Take me to Lake George, and the Gulf of Mexico. Make the life I never told you I wanted.”

He nods, quiet and unable to answer that, as she sidles towards him, her hip pressed to his. He lifts his arm and curls it around her narrow, sharp shoulders. She settles her head on his shoulder, and her breathing, calm, sedate, whispers across the skin of his neck.

“Don’t give up on her,” she says, into the gentle silence. “If you do, you give up on me.”

And he’s never been one to do that, not to her.

Not even if he wants to.

Not even if, for his own sanity, he should.

Hope.

This, he thinks, as it creeps into him again, filling the space where blackness used to be, is the monstrous feeling worse than anything. Worse than pity. Worse than hate.

He drops his mouth to press a kiss to her hair. She still smells the same.

Worse, even, than love.

 

 

 


End file.
